5. Conclusion

The saying "it's complicated to make it simple" applies particularly well to interfacing work. It's less surprising that many products are criticized for their abstruse user interface. There was a time when it was thought that the problem of interfaces could be solved by publishing standards that all designers would simply have to follow. Those days are gone, for a number of reasons:

• technological developments in information presentation are rapidly rendering standardized solutions obsolete;

• any new standard takes a long time to be adopted;

• standardized interfaces don't always keep up with the new functions that appear regularly.

Interfacing has thus become one of the R&D (research and development) areas of product design. Starting from...